A Turning of The Tide?

SINCE I turned my book Culture Crash in four years ago, a few things I described have proven me a bit pessimistic. (Visual art may be healthier than I predicted, and music steaming has become a bit more artist-friendly.) In some cases, though, even this grim tome of mine was a bit rose-colored. Even though I wrote — against the advice of my editor — a cautionary chapter on the Internet’s transformation of journalism, things have turned out far worse than I expected.

So even while I lamented what technological and other shifts had done to journalists themselves, and discussed the centrality of print journalism in the ecology of the arts, and even cautioned that journalism was a cornerstone of democracy, I had no idea we’d have a presidential election jacked by a foreign power and, as seems likely, former members of the KGB.

A growing body of criticism of the Internet and Silicon Valley has taken shape since Culture Crash came out, with Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind and Jon Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things two recent and exemplary examples.

My sense is that the mainstream press and a wide range of North Americans are now aware of the dangers that an unregulated Web opens our democracy up to. As a globe-trotting music-journalist friend, who speaks to a wide range of people, told me the other day, there seems to be a turning of the tide.

Facebook has endured a drip, drip of revelations concerning Russian operatives who used its platform to influence the 2016 presidential election by stirring up racist anger. Google had a similar role in carrying targeted, inflammatory messages during the election, and this summer, it appeared to play the heavy when an important liberal think tank, New America, cut ties with a prominent scholar who is critical of the power of digital monopolies. Some within the organization questioned whether he was dismissed to appease Google and its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, both longstanding donors, though New America’s executive president and a Google representative denied a connection.

Meanwhile, Amazon, with its purchase of the Whole Foods supermarket chain and the construction of brick-and-mortar stores, pursues the breathtakingly lucrative strategy of parlaying a monopoly position online into an offline one, too.

SAN FRANCISCO — Fires need fuel. In this era of political rage, a Twitter account that called itself the unofficial voice of Tennessee Republicans provided buckets of gasoline.

Its pre-election tweets were a bottomless well of inflammatory misinformation: “Obama wants our children to be converted to Islam! Hillary will continue his mission.” A mysterious explosion in Washington, it said, had killed one of Mrs. Clinton’s aides, raising her “body count” to six. Another proclaimed, “Obama is the founder of ISIS.”

The account, @TEN_GOP, eventually reached more than 130,000 followers — 10 times that of the official state Republican Party’s Twitter handle. It was one of the most popular political voices in Tennessee. But its lies, distortions and endorsements came from the other side of the world.

Overall, the press and both major political parties have been a bit soft on our technological overlords; I’ll be curious to see if this wave crests and leads to real regulation.

Comments

When people are so stupid as to believe much of the fake news, as in the examples you mention, we might have more fundamental problems than Russian meddling. We apparently have a population of Neanderthals. Also, we know the Russians meddled, but we don’t really know what effect it had. If it had been major, I think it would not be so hard to determine.

We do know, however, that the Republican “Swift Boat” fake news played a huge role in derailing Kerry’s campaign against Bush. And we know that Dan Rather was forced out of his job largely because he reported about Bush’s absenteeism in the Air National Guard. It was an incredibly crass example of a major political party bulling the media into submission. (And of course, we’ll hear how it was all justified and that Rather’s supposedly weak reporting was actually the issue.) Me thinks we look at the Russians not to see our own faults which are much more serious.

Interesting to have someone in Germany calling the mass of men subhuman. This ended well the last time

And changes in technology have made it harder to detect meddling — Facebook, Twitter, these other places are run by smart/ media-savvy people and THEY didn’t know what was happening — how are less-educated people who are being demagogued by Fox News, rant radio and their local red-state politicians?

Problems in the US experiment with democracy have become quite evident over the last two decades!

Cheap shot through intentional misreading.. As my use of the word “apparently” and my argument make clear, I don’t think fake news changed the last presidential election, much less that we have a population of neanderthals who so massively believed in it that it changed the election.. The cause, in my view is neoliberalism. You can only screw the working and middle class for so long before they begin making irrational protest votes. So fake news, and even Fox foolishness are not the root of the problem.

OTH, there are indeed some ironies when the mainstream media talks about fake news………

A large study entitled “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election” published in “The Journal of Economic Perspectives” (Volume 31, Number , Spring 2017, Pages 211–236) suggests that fake news did not significantly shape the outcome of the election. As the study notes:

“…if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point. This is much smaller than Trump’s margin of victory in the pivotal states on which the outcome depended.”

The study was conducted by Hunt Allcott, Associate Professor of Economics, New York University and Matthew Gentzkow, Professor of Economics, Stanford University.

At the very least, we have to say that we don’t know what effect fake news had.

Certainly, neoliberalism doesn’t help — bad system but not the same as Trumpism

But I think we are still figuring out the role of Russian and other meddling here. New information is being unearthed all the time. Since we are in medias res, an academic study is not going to answer this question

Worth recalling that HRC got 3 million more votes than DJT, and fought enormous levels of sexism. A bad campaign, sure, but there were layers here; not any single cause of this disaster

Overall I think Americans have placed too much faith in their system — it is clearly susceptible to hacking and hijacking. But calling the mass of the country Neanderthals does not exactly clarify things or make them better

And yet when we say that a significant number of people believe fake news like Hillary’s body count being up to six or that Obama is the founder of ISIS (the two examples mentioned by the Times that you quote,) we essentially label the populace Neanderthals. I refuse to believe people are that dumb.. We end up with the mainstream media’s fake news about social media’s fake news.

Nevertheless, you continue with your bad faith twisting of my original comment.

The real phenomenon with fake news seems to be something that might be labeled “political sport lying,” a kind of social media repartee that uses ridiculous lies as an expression of political allegiance and camaraderie. Generally speaking, it’s appeal seems to be exactly its fakeness. It’s very different from the mainstream media’s fake news which is intended to deceive a wide spectrum of the population (e.g. Judith Miller’s NYT reports that helped initiated the 2nd Iraq War, or the NYT’s and WP’s denunciations of Gary Webb’s reports about the CIA, the Contras, and drugs — which drove him to suicide..) Ironically, one of the biggest crashes of the Culture Crash has been American journalism.

Judith Miller deserves to be jailed. This said, hundreds of journalists covered the run-up to the Gulf Wars, and nearly all did it better than she did. Some, including a friend, were killed covering it

To claim that she is the essence of US journalism a bit like calling Wagner a typical classical composer or the Stalinist L Althusser a typical Left-aligned theorist

BTW, the CIA played a significant role in promoting the the so-called Arab Spring. One technique was the use of software that allowed agents to each control about 20 different sock puppet Internet identities they could use in social media to foment revolution. More details here:

Re CIA meddling: That is indeed unpleasant and discouraging. CIA and US have long, troubling history of this sort of thing

But we’ve gotten very far from my original point about the damage these digital overlords have done to democracy. Either you are disturbed to hear that Russia has meddled with our presidential election and helped install an authoritarian president, or you are not. Apparently it does not bother you

And the Trumpistas are very glad to hear that members of the Left are willing to overlook this sort of thing — seven or 11 more years of Trump/ Pence will be a lot of fun for those of us who still live here

No, I just don’t think Russian meddling had much of any effect on the election. That is mainstream fake news — a sort of neo-Red Baiting of post communist Russia.. And news flash: I live in the States about as much as I live in Germany so you’ll need to leave off the Trump style innuendos about me being an outsider…

Your “outsider” status does not bother me — I have tons of friends and allies overseas. But to hear Ubermensch arguments coming from Germany does ring certain unpleasant bells

It’s the general smugness and tendency to quote Baudrillard rather than look at actual evidence

And re your Palinist dismissal of “mainstream media”: These running dogs of imperialism at the New York Times recently invested enormous resources, and risked what could have been a crippling libel suit, to get on record, solidly and undeniably, the grotesqueries of Harvey Weinstein. Ask American women, especially those in the entertainment industry, if this is negligible and merely capitalist diversion

“Overall, the press and both major political parties have been a bit soft on our technological overlords; I’ll be curious to see if this wave crests and leads to real regulation.”

It’s not just social media and the internet (“our tech overlords”), and the lies they spread, that played a role in the election.

The people who voted for Trump have real economic concerns (or fears). I’ve recently read several books and articles on the way automation (or machine intelligence or artificial intelligence) is creeping into all aspects of the economy. It’s not just factory jobs, but service jobs as well. An article in the New Yorker pointed out that as soon as one warehouse or factory in an industry moves to expanded automation (and fewer jobs), all the similar businesses inevitably have to follow suit in order to stay competitive. Although the initial investment in automated plants is very high, the savings from dismissing all employees can make up for the investment in just a few years. And the price of goods falls as a direct result. The pressure on employment will only get worse. Our politics won’t change until this immense economic problem is addressed.

Largely agreed — lots of problems here in USA. My book was provoked partly by technological changes to arts/ music/ journalism, so I don’t discount the sense of dislocation a lot of Americans feel; I feel it myself. (Not sure I proposed an entire solution or explanation to US politics in my post; I’m talking about a single strand here.)

But the election was, of course, very close — three million more voters went for Hillary, and if a few thousand votes in the Midwest had swung, we’d be complaining that HRC was not giving Elizabeth Warren room enough to run, and that the Clinton admin looked like just another status quo extension of the Obama years

So there are LOTS of causes to this one — numerous factors (incl social media, Russians, bad strategy by DNC, etc.) ended up being decisive

I think the French philosopher and media theorist Jean Baudrillard was correct when he said that the purpose of the media is not truth, but a simulacrum of reality that serves a capitalist elite. With specious arguments, Trump exploited the problems created by neoliberalism, but the established media can’t deeply explore these issues because it would undermine neoliberalism. .

What’s fun to watch is otherwise educated people, usually on the Left, reject actual evidence — or express a complete lack of interest in it — because of something they read decades ago by a critical theorist

Followers of Sarah Palin operate similarly, with the details altered a bit

I studied critical theory deeply in college and to some extent in grad school. Baudrillard was always known as a minor-leaguer who said glib, quotable things for people who wanted a reductive, dismissive line. I see that hasn’t much changed since

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.)
Some advance praise:
With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]